Services

GEO / AEO

GEO and AEO services

What is GEO and AEO?

GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is the practice of increasing the likelihood that AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews cite, mention or recommend your brand. AEO, or answer engine optimisation, wins Google’s answer features: featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes and voice answers. Both reward the same habits: question-led headings, a direct answer in the first sentence of each section, and self-contained passages that make one specific, attributable claim. Neither replaces SEO. Google’s AI features retrieve from Google’s index, so a page must be crawlable, indexed, and trusted before it can be cited. Ahrefs found that the share of AI Overview citations from top-10 pages fell from about 76% in mid-2025 to about 38% by early 2026, so clear, extractable answers now matter as much as page rank.

What does the GEO / AEO service include?

Hitfire Digital’s GEO / AEO work covers both your site pages and the places AI platforms learn about you.

• AI visibility benchmark across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews for 10 to 20 priority questions
• Competitor citation analysis: who gets named instead of you, and why
• Key pages restructured answer-first, with question headings and self-contained passages
• Featured snippet and People Also Ask targeting in the right format: paragraph, list or table
• A brand fact sheet, so your name, services, and key facts match across every profile
• Robots.txt and firewall checks for AI search crawlers, plus an llms.txt file
• Monthly re-benchmarking against the same question set

Why do brand mentions matter for AI visibility?

Brand mentions shape AI visibility more than backlinks do. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at about 0.664, against about 0.218 for backlinks, roughly three times stronger. Its December 2025 update found YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation of all, at about 0.737, across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews. These are correlations, not proof of cause, but the pattern is consistent: AI models learn from text, and frequent, consistent mentions on trusted platforms shape how they describe a brand. That is why Hitfire Digital’s GEO work includes off-site presence: aligned profiles, educational video, LinkedIn articles, and genuine participation in the communities AI platforms read. Manufactured mentions, such as fake reviews or paid placements on low-quality sites, carry real risk and are not part of the service.

What results has this GEO / AEO work produced?

A B2B digital marketing agency wanted visibility for “fractional CMO in Chicago”, a competitive commercial query. Hitfire Digital cleaned up every issue a full crawl of that section surfaced, made sure the content was in the server-rendered HTML with a clear heading structure, and rewrote it for information gain: specific detail the existing results did not offer, in self-contained passages. The agency’s page was cited in Google’s AI Overview for that query. Clean, machine-readable pages get a site into consideration; genuinely new or more specific information is what earns the citation, because an AI Overview has no reason to cite a page that repeats what it already has.

A personal injury law firm had a large blog that was not producing case enquiries. Hitfire Digital refreshed a large share of the existing posts and restructured them answer-first, with question-based headings. Case review requests, the firm’s key lead metric, increased by roughly 25 to 30%. The gain came from content that already had authority, which is often the fastest win: refreshing it answer-first made it more useful to people, search engines, and AI systems at the same time, and the gains showed up in leads, not just rankings.

How do you measure AI visibility?

Hitfire Digital tracks AI visibility with a fixed set of 10 to 20 questions that your customers actually ask, run every month on ChatGPT with search enabled, Perplexity and Google. For each answer, we record whether your brand is mentioned, whether your site is cited, which competitors appear, and whether the facts about you are correct. Google AI Overviews vary between searches, so each query is run several times. Featured snippet and People Also Ask ownership are tracked alongside, because the same structure wins both. On your site, GA4 shows referral visits from AI platforms, and ChatGPT alone drives over 92% of trackable AI referral traffic, according to Previsible’s May 2026 research. Leads from those visits are the result that counts, so they are reported first, with citations and mentions as the leading indicators behind them.

Who does the work?

Hitfire Digital is run by Sadie de Pinto, an SEO lead and AI automation specialist based in Cape Town, with more than 20 years in technical SEO, web analytics, conversion rate optimisation and IT project management. She is the author of Search Mastery: The SEO, GEO & AEO Playbook (2026), the method this service follows, and holds a BCom in Information Systems from the University of Cape Town and an Executive MBA from Quantic. You work with her directly. Read more about Sadie.

GEO / AEO questions

Which related services work alongside this one?

GEO / AEO is often paired with Technical SEO and AI Automation. See Technical SEO services and AI Automation services, or compare all four Hitfire Digital services.